How to Eat (and Drink) Like the Queen: Royal Chefs Reveal Elizabeth II's Favorite Foods

It’s good to be the Queen. Twice a week, Queen Elizabeth II browses a leather-bound menu of the latest meal suggestions from the royal family’s head chef, Mark Flanagan, and whichever items she checks off, she gets to eat. The Telegraph recently spoke with two former royal chefs who were ready to dish out the Queen’s most personal food tastes.

Mealtime at Buckingham Palace isn’t always the extravagant affair non-royals might assume it to be. As former personal chef to the Queen Darren McGrady told The Telegraph, her royal majesty is no foodie. “She eats to live,” he said. And even the delicacies she does enjoy don’t appear on her plate every day. “The Queen loved scrambled eggs with smoked salmon and a grating of truffle. But she was too frugal to ever order fresh truffles and only really enjoyed them at Christmas when the truffles were sent as a gift.” Instead, she prefers regular cereal like Special K with fresh fruit for a typical breakfast.

But even the most humble meals served to the Queen are held to high standards. When Owen Hodgson, who worked in the palace kitchen in the early 1990s, spoke to The Telegraph, he recalled the level of detail that went into a simple tuna fish sandwich. The crusts were removed, the bread was buttered on both sides, and the sandwiches were cut into eight identical triangles before they were fit for the Queen.

Of course, the royal diet includes the most classic of British culinary traditions, afternoon tea. Queen Elizabeth has a weakness for chocolate, and there’s usually chocolate perfection pie or chocolate biscuit cake included in the spread.

For dinner, she likes to keep things light with grilled fish like sole served with vegetables and a salad. On Sundays, she enjoys a roast, preferring the well-done end slice over something more rare. Ingredients from her farms, like white peaches from Windsor Castle and fillets of beef and venison from Sandringham and Balmoral, are often worked into the menu.

As for her preferred drink, it's a gin and Dubonnet with a slice of lemon. She also sometimes drinks wine with lunch, and reportedly enjoys a glass of champagne before bed.

In 2017, the royal palace made it a little easier to drink like the Queen when they made wine from her royal vineyard available for the public to purchase. Beyond that, you may need to hire a personal chef of your own to recreate her full experience.

Why stop at bringing your own grocery bags to the store? One London grocery wants you to BYO-Tupperware. The London Evening Standardreports that a UK chain called Planet Organic has partnered with Unpackaged—a company dedicated to sustainable packaging—to install self-serve bulk-food dispensers where customers can fill their own reusable containers with dry goods, cutting down on plastic packaging waste.

To use the system, customers walk up and weigh their empty container at a self-serve station, printing and attaching a label with its tare weight. Then, they can fill it with flour, nuts, or other kinds of dry goods, weigh it again, and print the price tag before taking it up to the check out. (Regular customers only have to weigh their containers once, since they can save the peel-off label to use again next time.)

Planet Organic is offering cereals, legumes, grains, nuts, chocolate, dried fruit, and even some cleaning products in bulk as part of this program, significantly reducing the amount of waste shoppers would otherwise be taking home on each grocery trip.

Zero-waste grocery stores have been popping up in Europe for several years. These shops, like Berlin's Original Unverpackt, don't offer any bags or containers, asking customers bring their own instead. This strategy also encourages people to buy only what they need, which eliminates food waste—there's no need to buy a full 5-pound bag of flour if you only want to make one cake.

The concept is also gaining traction in North America. The no-packaging grocery store in.gredients opened in Austin, Texas in 2011. The Brooklyn store Package Free, opened in 2017, takes the idea even further, marketing itself as a one-stop shop for "everything that you'd need to transition to a low waste lifestyle." It sells everything from tote bags to laundry detergent to dental floss.

When it comes to processed foods, the palate of the average American isn't very adventurous. A bag of pickle-flavored Lay's chips might be a radical snack option. But if researchers in Denmark are on the right track, we may soon be crunching a very different kind of treat: jellyfish chips, as Futurism reports.

The ethereal-looking marine animals are usually recognized for their squishy frames and sometimes as a threat due to their venomous sting. They're often prepared for human consumption in Asian cultures, with the body being marinated in salt and potassium for weeks to create a crunchy delicacy. Recently, Danish scientists at the University of Southern Denmark were able to expedite this process, using ethanol to create a crispy jellyfish chip in a matter of days.

Mie T. Pedersen

Why bother? Due to overfishing, more popular seafoods are experiencing shortages. The jellyfish, however, have a flourishing population and are rich in vitamins and minerals.

Right now, researchers are focused on the microscopic changes that take place when processing a jellyfish from its gooey natural state to a hardened, crunchy form. It could be a while before any serious product development is conducted. And as far as taste goes, it might need a bit of seasoning. The current process for making jellyfish consumable results in a taste that some have compared to eating a salty rubber band.